XML for Not Yet Techies

XML is the foundation for a whole new way of communicating across the Internet, and even beyond. XML is going to revolutionize how we use the web.

So what does that mean? And why should you care? Let’s say it’s a few years from now.

1. You log on to the Internet to look up the phone number of a friend in Shanghai. The telephone directory web site offers you the choice to view the directory in 20 different major languages. You pick English. When your (Chinese) friend in Shanghai logs on to the same telephone directory web site to look up your phone number, he picks Mainland Chinese characters.

2. While you’re traveling on a sales call, your boss looks up data on the company which is your prospect, which is stored on your company’s intranet. He sends you the report to read. Although it’s 200 pages long, you are easily able to pick out the information which you feel is relevant and read it -- on your cell phone. When you’re finished, you relax in your hotel room by watching a movie which you selected by feeding the words "latest" and "action" into the TV’s search engine.

3. You get the contract. You call in the specifications. Two engineers begin work on the project. One reads the specs as most people do. The other reads them in Braille, since she’s blind.

OK, let me try to explain from the top. The publishing industry has been concerned for many years with standards for presenting documents. Of course, that’s their business. They have used what’s called the Standard General Markup Language (SGML) for many years now.

When the World Wide Web came along, someone pulled pieces of SGML and put them together to design web pages, and that’s how HTML (HyperText Markup Language) was born. It’s sort of a child of SGML.

Now, HTML is good at telling web browsers how to display text and other parts of a web pages. And of course it also has hypertext links. That’s its job. But as the Internet has advanced, many people have clamored for more than that.

XML - Page 2